Michael Winship: Speak Now or Forever Hold off Peace

There is no truth to the rumor that, in honor of the late mime Marcel Marceau, the nation of France will pause to observe a moment of noise.

Sorry.

Nevertheless, as the saying goes, a mime is a terrible thing to waste (somebody stop me). So let me take unseemly advantage of Monsieur Marceau's demise to make a couple of points about something that at first glance might seem antithetical to his art: the power of speech. Free speech.

By now, you may have seen the YouTube video of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer being roughed up and Tasered by campus police after he refused to relinquish the microphone at an appearance by John Kerry.

Granted, Meyer was rude, obnoxious and disorderly. But zapped with 20,000-50,000 volts of electricity? As The Orlando Sentinel editorialized, "Getting taken from the hall and Tasered by police proved more disruptive than anything Mr. Meyer had to say. And like other schools' attempts to stymie speech invariably do, it now is the only thing people want to talk about."

Which is just one reason Columbia University was wise to allow Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on its campus Monday. As Columbia President Lee Bollinger said, a university "is committed to confronting ideas -- to understand the world as it is and as it might be."

Bollinger promised to confront Ahmadinejad with tough questions, but in fact, the Iranian proved to be his own worst enemy: evasive, rambling and in a perpetual state of denial. He said that further research is needed to prove the Holocaust occurred, that women are treated equally in Iraq and that homosexuals have not been executed in his nation because, well, there aren't any.

Robert O'Neil, former president of both the University of Wisconsin and the University of Virginia, told The Associated Press, "I'd be very surprised if the Columbia community did not, as a result of Mr. Ahmadinejad's appearance ... learn a great deal more about what's wrong with contemporary Iran than they would have learned if President Ahmadinejad had been turned away. If you suppress a viewpoint by disallowing or barring a controversial speaker, you make the speaker a martyr."

That would have played into the hands of both Ahmadinejad and the Bush administration, which has labored long and hard to make the Iranian president appear to be more controlling and influential than he really is. In fact, the real boss in Iran is "The Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khameni.

"Pat Robertson has more power than Ahmadinejad," Reza Aslan, the Iranian-American scholar and author of "No god but God," said at a seminar I attended last spring. "He does not control the army, or the budget or foreign policy. Everyone in the American government knows this. Pretending Ahmadinejad is Hitler and Iran is 1939 Germany is absurd."

Columbia President Bollinger's introduction on Monday verged on bluster. "You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," he told the Iranian. "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions."

Such bloviation is another lamentable but unavoidable byproduct of free speech.

Witness the flap over the MoveOn.org "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" ad.
It was a dumb and puerile headline, allowing Republicans and the Bush White House to glom onto the advertisement and try to distract us from the horror of this rotten war.

Thus, no progress is made in the Senate toward putting an end to the madness, but the one resolution they are able to pass --- 72-25 -- is a non-binding measure condemning MoveOn for the ad. Strike a blow for freedom.

The day after, an editorial in The New York Times, headlined "In Search of a Congress," declared, "Mr. Bush's only idea is to keep the war going until he leaves office, and that means that other co-equal branch of government, the Congress, will have to lead the way out.

"Democrats and Republicans who oppose the war have a duty to outline alternatives. Those who call for staying in Iraq have a duty to explain what victory means and how they plan to achieve it. Both sides are shirking an obligation to deal with issues that must be resolved right now. ..."